Artist: Foxygen Album: Foxygen...And Star Power (2014) You’d be hard-pressed to find a more polarizing upstart of a band than Foxygen. Tagged with so much promise following the release of their 2012 debut, Take the Kids Off Broadway, the duo of Sam France and Jonathan Rado teamed up with Richard Swift for a brilliant follow-up with 2013’s We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. It was only after the pair found a small modicum of underground buzz that they were forced to put a band together and play shows, and the results were a spectacle at best, and terrible on the other end. So it’s with a grain of salt that the duo’s new partnership with Star Power, a sort-of-fictional LA rock ensemble, was to be taken for the group’s proper third album ...And Star Power. As it turns out, the record is indulgent, unhinged, sprawling, funny and sometimes spookily great―all adjectives most observers ought not to be so surprised about. Throughout the entirety of ..And Star Power, the omnipresence of tape hiss permeates the recordings, offering a very stark contrast to the lush, layered and more focused We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic. At 82 minutes, the LP is impossibly long for how aimless it is, entertaining an air of juvenile experimentation not dissimilar to their raving-mad ruminations on the excellent Take the Kids Off Broadway. In fact, ...And Star Power is essentially a return to the grimey, DIY spirit of that first record, buffing the sheen away to expose some rusty, bumbling core. Songs are allowed to fall apart, tones are empowered to free themselves of any continuity song-to-song, revealing vignettes of sometimes profoundly earnest song tidbits, and sometimes simply random rummagings of sounds. If it’s some secret genius, the jury is still decidedly out. Either way, you’ll want to hear this one for yourself. (from pastemagazine (10-14-14)) youtube/watch?v=PqW7EfA3VWE
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 16:27:25 +0000
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